Read Online The Book of Dust: The Secret Commonwealth (Book of Dust, Volume 2) by Philip Pullman - Free Book Online

they would have a good time, as he’d said. For a moment, Lyra envied this unknown other girl, because Dick was good company and considerate as well as more than good-looking; but then she remembered that after only a few weeks with him, she’d begun to feel confined. There were areas of her life about which she cared passionately, and which he was indifferent to or simply unaware of. She’d never be able to talk to him about Pan and separation, for example.
    She stood up, and then bent down and kissed him, which took him by surprise. “You won’t be waiting long,” she said.
    He smiled. Bindi and Pan touched noses, and then Pan leapt to Lyra’s shoulder and they moved away through the bar and into the chilly street.
    She began to turn left, but stopped, and thought for a second, and then crossed the street instead and went into Jordan.
    “What now?” said Pan, as she waved to the porter in the lodge window.
    “The rucksack.”
    They climbed the stairs to their old room in silence. Once she’d locked the door behind them and switched on the gas fire, she rolled back the rug and prized up the floorboard. Everything was as they’d left it.
    She retrieved the rucksack and took it to the armchair, under the lamplight. Pan crouched on the little table while Lyra unfastened the buckles. She would very much have liked to tell Pan how uneasy she felt, part guilty, part sad, part overwhelmingly curious. But talking was so difficult.
    “Who are we going to tell about this?” he said.
    “Depends what we find.”
    “Why?”
    “I don’t know. Maybe it doesn’t depend on that. Let’s just…”
    She didn’t bother to finish the sentence. She folded back the top of the rucksack and found a neatly folded shirt that had once been white and a sweater of coarse dark blue wool, both much darned, and under them a pair of rope-soled sandals, badly worn down, and a tin box about the size of a large Bible, held shut with a couple of thick rubber bands. It was heavy, and the contents didn’t move or make a noise when she turned the box around in her hands. It had once contained Turkish smokeleaf, but the painted design was almost worn away. She opened it and found several small bottles and sealed cardboard boxes tightly packed in with cotton fibers.
    “Botanical stuff, maybe,” she said.
    “Is that all?” said Pan.
    “No. Here’s his toiletry bag or something.”
    It was made of faded canvas and contained a razor and shaving brush and a nearly empty tube of toothpaste.
    “There’s something else,” Pan said, peering inside the rucksack.
    Her hand found a book—two books—and brought them out. Disappointingly, they were both in languages she couldn’t read, though one looked from the illustrations like a textbook of botany, and the other, from the way it was laid out on the page, a long poem.
    “Still more,” said Pan.
    At the bottom of the rucksack she found a bundle of papers and brought them all out. They consisted of three or four offprints from learned journals, all concerning botany; a small battered notebook that at a quick look contained names and addresses from all over Europe and beyond; and a small number of handwritten pages. These were creased and stained, and the handwritten words were in a pale pencil. But whereas the journal offprints were in Latin or German, she saw at a quick glance that the written pages were in English.
    “Well?” he said. “Are we going to read them?”
    “Of course. But not here. The light in here’s dreadful. I don’t know how we managed to do any work at all.”
    She folded the pages and put them in an inside pocket, and then replaced everything else before unlocking the door and getting ready to leave.
    “And am I going to be allowed to read them too?” he said.
    “Oh, for God’s sake.”
    They said not a word on the way back to St. Sophia’s.

Lyra made herself some hot chocolatl and sat at her little table by the fire, with the lamp close by, to read the